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"Life after Death Today in the United States, Japan, and China" is a book written by Gordon Mathews, Yang Yang, and Miu Ying Kwong. The authors conducted research on the afterlife in these three countries, using intensive interviews as their primary research method. The book explores the complex and varied beliefs and practices related to life after death, and how these beliefs reflect people's lives before death. The authors also discuss the factors that shape people's beliefs, such as Christianity in the United States, Buddhist ancestor veneration in Japan, and the shift away from state atheism in China. Despite cultural differences, the authors found similarities among the three cultures, including the influence of religious or spiritual orientation on belief in the afterlife, and the increasing significance of individual choice. While some assumptions in the book may be questioned, it offers an interesting and informative read for those interested in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and religious studies. [Extracted from the article]

AbstractThe paper explores the sonic aspect of the annual Aravan festival celebrated in the rural village of Koovagam, Tamil Nadu, India. The festival has gained popularity as the “Koovagam transgender festival” due to the participation of thousands of transgender women, known as Aravanikal in Tamil, from across India. The paper explores the relationship between the festival and sound by examining four distinct aspects: a patrikai (brochure), a village-specific mythical story, a unique listening experience of a group of women, and the participation of Aravanikal in the festival. The study unveils the integral role of sound, interwoven within a myth, in shaping the identity of the village. It delves into how this significance resonates within the local culture’s perception of sound. The paper demonstrates that a particular group of women is excluded from participating in all sensory aspects of a ritual, except for the auditory realm. In this cultural context, sound is not subject to the same restrictions as other senses. The paper further argues that the festival has a hidden erotic dimension beneath its apparent layers, which is revealed through sounds, producing an “aural erotica” that subverts existing norms governing discussions about sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the women-centric development schemes and programs launched by the government for the tribal people in India in general and the female members of the Lodha community in particular, and the impact of the development schemes on the livelihood of these women. This microstudy was carried out on the Lodha, a particularly vulnerable tribal group for their extreme backwardness among the tribal communities of India, living in a village named Goaldihi in Paschim Medinipur district of West Bengal. The women in this community seem to carry a triple burden of backwardness, firstly for being women, secondly as Scheduled Tribe and thirdly as PVTG, and to remove which the government has planned certain schemes for their development. The realization of the aims of development from the perspectives of millennium development goals reveals a dismal picture. This paper examines the dominant paradigms of development and the state's role in it to understand the trajectory of development practices among a denotified (earlier branded as criminal tribe), traditionally foraging tribe in contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines urban and well-educated Taiwanese women's resistance to the dominance of the valorization of female appearance, providing ethnography of undoing beauty in East Asia's era of post-developmentalism. Findings reveal the importance of the factor of time in their resistance to bodily grooming. First, participants have a "holistic" understanding of "doing beauty"; they consider this set of gender inequalities "chrono-normativity," which serves as a vector of social control. Second, the burden of long-term sustainability of aesthetic investment often turns into an unbearable weight that includes an endless quest for extreme slenderness, the exhausting immaterial labor of enacting cuteness and hetero-likability, and the difficulty of long-term financial affordability. Third, due to a bleak economic outlook and strong gender inequalities, disapproval of the quest for beauty showcases women's rejection of pursuing market success based on an aspirational and future-oriented temporality. Participants' "lying down" attitude and their emphasis on "assured little happiness" are witness to an anti-aspirational temporality, since women seek a present-focused and non-dominated experience of temporality. I argue that this anti-aspirationalism should be seen as an alternative configuration of neoliberal rationality where the care of the self and its ethos of individualism eclipse the pursuit of economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the act of listening offered by active listening volunteers is a "gift" that requires reciprocity from elderly people. Active listening volunteers (keicho borantia) in Japan offer conversation and listening services for elderly people in local areas. Previous researchers investigate unsatisfying visits such as having boring conversations, and suggest the need for honing listening skills, or better pairing, and so on. This study, however, reveals that these solutions might not improve the situation, and, using participant observation and interviews, finds fundamental issues around reciprocity instead. First, and most importantly, volunteers do not realize that their listening functions as a "gift," which brings power dynamics, forcing elders either to stay as helpees, or to reciprocate. This paper, therefore, argues that even an act of listening in the field of volunteering can be perceived as a "non-free gift" by elderly people. Second, overemphasizing the importance of active listening obstructs reciprocity, letting volunteers cling to the role of listeners and helpers. In conclusion, this study suggests that volunteers need to understand three aspects: the importance of reciprocity; the fundamental power imbalance in caring activities; and the variety of reasons for elderly people to meet volunteers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across Northern Thailand, het thop mushrooms (Astraeus) are foraged and sold into an increasingly commodified marketplace. A species of wild fungi that only appears for a short time each year, it is widely enjoyed across the diverse range of communities living in the region and increasingly positioned as part of the Lanna food and cultural aesthetic. Through a rapid rise in price over recent decades and the subsequent forging of supply chains linking rural communities to urban and online markets, foraging practices now provide significant seasonal incomes and form an essential part of annual livelihoods. However, as this paper contends – working closely with the analytical framing of "precarity" put forth by Tsing (2015) in a similar fungal context – there are forms of precariousness and uncertainty that are inherent in wild products, from the indeterminant ecologies from which it emerges, to the unreliable livelihoods that arise from it, and the fickle market for such products. The purpose is not to dismiss this market as frivolous or problematic, but rather to suggest that in a disturbed and distorted environmental and economic context such as Northern Thailand, this is indicative of a wider shift toward a "salvage economy." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper serves as an introduction to a PhD thesis titled "Transition to Adulthood for Young People with Care Experience in China." The thesis is a comprehensive exploration of the lived experiences and perspectives of young individuals as they navigate life within care institutions, transition out of care, and adapt to life after leaving care. This highlight outlines the fundamental components of the research project, encompassing the background, primary aim, objectives, research questions, selected methodology, and the theoretical frameworks applied throughout the study. Additionally, it provides a concise summary of the key findings derived from the thesis and underscores their significance in advancing our understanding of this knowledge field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the transformation of the Sichuan hot pot from a regional Chinese food to a global cuisine. It first analyzes how Sichuan food businesses had been "gentrified" by rigorous state regulation and control. With a series state-led food standardization and industrialization programs, hot pot restaurants quickly developed a franchising business model. In the late 2010s, several famous hot pot brands have established in different locations in the bustling cities in the United States. Challenging the taste buds of world food consumers, the hot and numbing sensation of the Sichuan hot pot is part of the national trajectory that aims to enhance China's soft power. The paper argues that unlike the previous waves of Chinese food globalization brought by the earlier migrants from China, the globalizing hot pot is a different kind of Chinese food globalization developed within a political and economic context that witnesses China's rise to global power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I demonstrate how long-term multigenerational minorities and Japanese residents engage in the current socio-political discourse of "multicultural coexistence" society (tabunkakyōsei shakai), which had not previously been integral to the vocabulary of national rhetoric in Japan until the 2000s. I argue that the lack of clear definition and goals of multicultural coexistence by the current Japanese government generates obstacles in the attempt to build a multicultural society. While local municipalities' programs, such as multilingual services and lifestyle support, are certainly needed, long-term foreign residents with linguistic and cultural competence are suspicious of the concept of multicultural coexistence due to their own embodied marginalized positions. Taking a local municipality's intercultural event as a point of reference, this paper explores how long-term minority residents perceive their positions at the crossroads of seemingly paradoxical forces of multicultural trends and an ongoing national identity founded upon ethnic homogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an ethnographer's reconstruction of his experience in Thailand with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in the 1980s and early 1990s, and the flux of opposing biases he was subject to as a black African on one hand and a farang development expert on the other. The paper discusses how racial thinking affected dynamics in the UN office and in the field, and how and why those dynamics played out differently over the course of the project. It describes racial hierarchies and meanings situated in this particular country and era as a contribution to an unfinished anthropological inquiry: how blackness and whiteness are intimately woven into the everyday practices of development bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unedited conference by Michel Foucault] in Architecture, Movement, Continuité [Architecture, Mobility, Continuity] 5: 46 - 49. 12 Foucault, Michel. This set of papers, by authors from Japan, Europe, the US and Canada, originated from a panel entitled "Heterotopia in Post-Growth Rural Japan: Negotiating Difference in Local Communities" at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose, California, 2018. In "Of Other Spaces", Foucault begins by thinking of a mirror as the locus of both real and virtual space: "...it renders this place that I occupy at the moment I look at myself...[as] absolutely real...and [in that moment also] absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived [my image and the surroundings] ha[ve] to pass through the virtual point which is over there" (Foucault in Dehaene and De Cauter [4], 17). [Extracted from the article]

Coalescing in the 1980s, visual kei is currently a Japanese music subculture known for flamboyant theatrics, a woman-dominated fanbase, and its performers' non-normative, often playfully queer gender expressions, which defy heteronormative binaries and hegemonic conceptions of gender and sexuality. This article illuminates the queer facets of visual kei through an in-depth investigation focusing on two forms of binary-destabilizing expression: onnagata/josō and "gender free" or gender-bending. The first involves complete adoption of feminine-coded clothing by self-identified male performers, the second a disregard or even intentional disruption of gendered boundaries. Combining ethnographic fieldwork data with close analysis of social media discourse, this paper explores the "queer lives" of visual kei performers through their personae. This double-pronged approach is necessary as these queer expressions are created and reiterated through both the "live" concert performance and the appearance of "lives" created through social media. In creating these "lives," performers often employ casual, fluid utilization of queer expression which destabilizes normative gender and sexuality narratives while not necessarily explicitly invoking any queer identity. Through elucidating these multifaceted, ambiguous yet queer performances, this paper aims to help complicate current discourse on queer lives in Japan and wider scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how certain perceived attributes of Japanese houses affect and shape the bodies of their inhabitants – namely, Russian women in Japan. In turn, this relationship affects the women's modes of being in the host country. Drawing on fieldwork data, I explore how the coldness and wetness of houses mediate the effects on the inhabitants' senses, creating an affective experience of being "absorbed" by the physicality of one's home. The study reveals how bodily reactions to and affective engagements with their agentic homes in the host country underpin the migrants' everyday sensory-affective spectrums. Such sensory experiences play a central role in the women's perceptions and constructions of selfhood. This paper further shows how these sense-driven experiences are enmeshed in broader discursive flows. They are linked to familial, communal, and societal power relations embedded in the reality of being a migrant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tarō is one of many small fishing communities on the northeastern coast of Iwate Prefecture which was decimated by Japan's catastrophic tsunami on 11 March 2011. Historically, in most parts of the world, including Japan, post-disaster sightseeing has often been portrayed as a form of Dark Tourism emphasizing death, loss and devastation. However, in Tarō, community-led tourism post-2011 has become the catalyst for a positive, fortifying, identity-building economic development strategy infused by hope for the future referred to locally as Bōsai (Disaster Prevention) Tourism. Using an ethnographic approach, this paper argues that, unlike many post-disaster tourism sites, Bōsai Tourism in Tarō builds around place-based practices and traditional community knowledge to provide a positive, satisfying touristic experience for visitors, and gives local residents unprecedented yet tangible social, economic, and political goals to strive for as they embrace the future, designed to transform local tragedy into a local triumph. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper – at the intersection of island studies, youth research, and the anthropology of the future – examines the future perspectives of young Oki Islanders. When we investigate future images, we also explore present-day action. What do young people expect, what do they aspire to, what do they dream? In metropolitan post-growth Japan, the "crisis of youth" and the "lost generation" of the "lost decade" have become common expressions signaling challenges facing contemporary Japan. What will happen in the future? This paper is based on semi-structured interviews and surveys conducted among senior high school students in Ama-chō (Oki Islands) in 2015. The paper argues that the islands' insularity contributes to a better understanding of the dialectical local/global interplay influencing young people's everyday life practices and education and career preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Japanese grape wine production has been promoted as cultural heritage, through the collaboration of local official and private actors. In 2018, Japan's wine making was designated as a national cultural heritage through a governmental program called "Japan Heritage," highlighting the history associated with wine production in a specific area in Yamanashi Prefecture, a long-standing wine-making region in Japan. In this creation of heritage, historical narratives of wine production have been rediscovered and invented. Essentially, this heritagization strategy is not preserving wine culture but creating one, developing touristic resources and stimulating local economy. The politics of making wine heritage in Japan reveals a national governance of food culture with the goal of making Japan a global tourism destination and promoting rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the heritigization of milk tea making technique as a lens to explore post-colonial cultural governance, placemaking and identity building in post-colonial Hong Kong. Based on the data and information collected through ethnographic study, personal interviews, and media researches on milk tea production and consumption, this study investigates how the Hong Kong government, the entrepreneurs and consumers interactively commodify tradition and culinary skills in tea-making for city branding, economic development and identity politics. This paper reveals that the meaning of milk tea in the official narrative supports the government vision of a harmonious society with docile labor. In contrast, the younger generation considers milk tea an icon representing an alternate Hong Kong spirit of rebelliousness, indicating a widening gap in the interpretation of cultural values and political orientation between the Hong Kong government and the younger generation under the background of Hong Kong's rapid political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last twenty years, Japanese transgender people have acquired increased visibility in mainstream Japanese society. Notwithstanding that, female-to-male (FTM) trans people continue to be misunderstood by the Japanese public, and largely underrepresented in Anglophone academic scholarship. This paper therefore seeks to account for one aspect of FTM cultural life in present-day Japan that has largely remained invisible to mainstream society. Drawing on my fieldwork at FTM drinking parties in Tokyo between 2013 and 2019, I demonstrate how seemingly trivial drinking events not only play an important role in fostering a sense of community among their participants, but also enable the claiming of transgender cultural citizenship in a conservative state like Japan, which only recognizes a narrowly defined notion of transgender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urespa, meaning "to grow together" in the Ainu language, is a social venture founded at Sapporo University in 2010. The Urespa club brings Indigenous Ainu and Wajin (i.e. non-Ainu) students together in a curriculum-based environment to co-learn the Ainu language and Ainu cultural practices. The initiative's aim is to restory the conventional narrative of Otherness in Japan by creating a transformative space or "micropublic" in which students can work collaboratively across ethnic difference. In this paper, we argue that Urespa succeeds in effecting an inclusive social setting for both Ainu and Wajin students through the design and implementation of a process which promotes and, recursively, is shaped by, a transcultural form of social encounter. The challenge this makes to the promotion of multicultural programming within Japan in recent decades is important although not without controversy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic materials gathered from participant observation and interviewing in and beyond corporate contexts in Shanghai, this paper shows how a culture of overtime work was sustained and legitimated in urban China and how white-collar workers endured, rationalized, and accommodated it. In particular, I discuss forms of managerial control imposed on white-collar workers and social control prevalent in the workplace, to shed light on the formation of a kind of corporate governmentality in urban China and its implications for shaping the personhood of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents new insights into contemporary Chinese demography and family life based on survey and interview data from rural households in Yunnan Province, China's most ethnically and linguistically diverse region. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we examine fertility trends, sex ratios, and son preferences in our study sample. We analyze differences between the majority Han and various ethnic minority groups that have been subject to less stringent family-planning policies. Our results show an overall fertility decline and a trend toward more balanced sex ratios, both of which are in line with national trends. We find evidence for son preference in the demographic data for both Han and minority households, despite widespread agreement in qualitative interviews rejecting the idea of son preference and emphasizing the value of both sons and daughters. We interpret these findings in light of several important changes in Chinese society, including legal and policy reforms governing marriage and inheritance, a nationwide "Care for Girls" social campaign, and shifting cultural norms about gender roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the emerging transnational mobility of Japanese young men as lifestyle migrants in Southeast Asia, mainly targeting those in their twenties and thirties moving to Thailand for a change of life. Japanese lifestyle migrants are considered to be socio-cultural “refugees” who escape the stresses of Japanese society and seek a better quality of life elsewhere. This paper explores how and to what extent mobility liberates Japanese men from the male-centered corporate culture orsalarymanmasculinity. It also analyzes the role that travel writings have had in the social labelling and facilitation of the lifestyle mobility of Japanese young men sojourning in Southeast Asia in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While much media and scholarly attention has been paid to the growing tension between Hong Kong people and Indonesian foreign domestic workers, the underlying reasons of cultural difference are largely ignored as an explanation for the challenges Indonesian domestic workers face in Hong Kong. Most often, Islam is one of the primary cultural differences that Hong Kong people overlook. This paper begins with an overview of the significance of Indonesian Muslim foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong society and the domestic sphere. Then, the paper suggests that the Indonesian Muslim domestic helpers have been politically weak, struggling and accommodating to the mainstream Chinese culture. Generally speaking, Indonesian Muslim domestic workers in Hong Kong have been powerless under the global labor market and the local socio-cultural forces of Chinese society. Nevertheless, there has been an emerging visibility of Islam through their re-assertion of Islamic piety in Hong Kong everyday life via, for example, veiling, practicing daily prayer, and seeking to follow ahalaldiet. Visibility, however, does not mean accommodation and understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the growing popularity of heritage tourism throughout the world in recent years, international agencies have guided their member states to develop different forms of tourism, including cultural tourism, sustainable tourism, and local participation in heritage conservation and tourism development. This paper first reviews the concepts of cultural tourism, heritage, sustainable development, and sustainable tourism, upon which international guidance has been based and practiced. It then explores the interpretations and applications of international guidance by the Cambodian national authorities in the Angkor World Heritage site, and compares these to the responses and applications by local NGOs and social enterprises. Angkor World Heritage site demonstrates a highly controversial national interpretation and application of international guidance, which is complemented, but only somewhat, by the initiatives of local NGOs and social entrepreneurs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on my own experience as both a student and a teacher, this paper illuminates the “gap” between the systems of anthropology education in Japanese and American universities, and argues that the major “gap” between the Japanese and the American systems of anthropology education lies in the number of professional anthropologists in the unit of teaching and that small Japanese programs with just a handful of anthropologists can offer only general apprenticeship-type training while large American departments with at least fifteen or more anthropologists can provide a wide range of courses and advisory committees of specialists matching the areas of concentration chosen by graduate students. I conclude that this “gap” in the size and style of anthropology education explains why more “star” anthropologists are produced in America than in Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that Japan and notions of Japaneseness are becoming “postfamilial” in breaking from earlier models and roles, and that one aspect of Japan's post-familial shift can be observed in the sharp rise in the number of “fuzzy” household members, specifically dogs, cats, and rabbits over the past three decades. In Japan, pets now outnumber children under the age of 15. The number one consumer of companion animals is also the fastest growing demographic in Japan: adults whose adult children have left home. Dogs are the focus of this paper. Dogs are more publicly prominent than cats or rabbits and they are an increasing presence in homes, parks, and cafés in urban Japan. Moreover, the representation of human–canine relations has become prominent in popular media; for example “the Softbank dog,”Kaikun, has become a television advertising celebrity. Furry familiar others are projected to be an ever-increasing presence in urban Japan. Thus, “fuzzy” also denotes the boundary blurring familial roles that some dogs encroach upon. This paper discusses how touch, affect, and embodiment entangle in dealing with urban Japan's exploding population of companion canines; a space where dogs are coming to be viewed as stand-in or surrogate fathers, friends, and even lovers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1959 to 1984, some 90,000 Koreans migrated from Japan to North Korea as part of the “repatriation movement.” Enduring severe deprivation in North Korea, in the last decade some 300 of these individuals have returned to Japan. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this paper asks how gift giving and the attendant obligation to reciprocate impacts on relations between non-profit organizations (NPOs) and the people they seek to help. I answer this question by examining the resettlement of returnees from North Korea, and their relationship to members of Japanese civil society. The organizations working with returnees primarily consist of elderly Japanese men who aid returnees out of guilt for their support in the 1960s and 1970s of the socialist left, North Korea, and the repatriation movement. Their assistance engenders a feeling of debt in the people they help. Returnees try to mitigate this debt by performing acts of “flexible filial piety” toward NPO members. But returnees’ attempts to renegotiate the burden of the gift consequently endanger themselves and their families who remain in North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper discusses the rise to academic significance of Heritage Studies, and suggests four emerging entry points for the analysis of heritage problems, these being the fields of heritage, the markets for heritage, the different levels of identity towards which heritage is intended to contribute, and the various stages in a cycle of heritage. The paper concludes by suggesting major trends in attitudes to heritage in the 21st century and with challenges concerning the management of heritage in particular sites in the United Kingdom and in Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research in a traditional Shanghainese alleyway-house neighborhood (known locally aslilong)during 2013–2015, this study describes how knowledge of the global encourages pragmatic local residents to foresee a different future and voluntarily get involved in the process of urban renewal to enhance their own interests. This study unpacks the notion of architectural heritage as a selling point of dilapidated structures, which is the means through which local residents mobilize their knowledge to benefit themselves in the fight against local government authorities and the market economy. “Gentrification from within” is the concept that I develop in this paper to explain this unique process of demographic change involving capital investment and cultural reproduction, in which the original residents themselves are the key actors in the diversification of a traditional neighborhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than 10 years, the number of Japanese women who live or emigrate overseas has been surpassing that of Japanese men. On the other hand, corporate workers who have been relocated overseas for shorter periods by their companies are predominantly Japanese men. What this means is that Japanese men are more bound to their homeland and, in this sense, more domestic than Japanese women. Especially since 2010, the state-driven development of “Global Human Resources” (GHR) has been intensifying the familiar associations between men, corporations, and going overseas, which re-impose the nationalistic, corporate-centric masculine norm on young men’s minds. This does not mean, however, that all men in Japan fit the corporate worker model, or that they are all content with Japanese society. Based on interview data of Japanese temporary residents in their 20s, 30s, and 40s in Canada and Australia, with special focus on the narratives of men, this paper elucidates how the meaning of going/being overseas for personal happiness is both gendered and classed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reviews changes and continuities in postwar English-language ethnographic descriptions of Okinawa, noting the contributions of both native and non-native English speakers. I argue that, especially prior to 1995, this research was generally complicit in obfuscating the everyday, lived consequences of war and military occupation in Okinawa. I also show that more politically critical, theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically diverse portrayals of Okinawa have emerged since 1995. And, I contend that in future critical ethnographies must also include those which describe the gendered experiences of everyday life in urbanized, dependent capitalist Okinawa. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Guangzhou and Lagos, this paper explores transnational trade activities and family strategies among Chinese/Nigerian interracial couples in the context of growing China/Africa trade relations and the recent tightening of China's immigration control. It examines how restrictive immigration policy at the state level and anti-black racism at the personal level impact romantic and marriage relations between undocumented Nigerian men and Chinese migrant women from less developed regions in China. I argue that the transnational business and family strategies envisioned and practiced by these couples reflect both the structural constraints in their incorporation into local Chinese society, and their active quest for economic prosperity and upward mobility in the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Filipina Christians pack their religion as they migrate overseas for work. And although Filipinas in search of work overseas do not list religious freedom and tolerance as one of their considerations for a destination country, once they have settled, religion functions as a coping mechanism in dealing with the migration process and serves to link migrants with their homeland. This paper explores this overlooked area in the research on Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. It examines Filipina domestic workers' religious beliefs and practices, and how these practices compare to those in their country of origin. It also examines how they make use of their religiosity as a survival and adaptive strategy in a city-state that has no state religion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite its social and architectural visibility, in Hong Kong religion remains a minority attribute. Tracing the presence, or rather absence, of religion in the territory's current framework laws (the Basic Law, the Bill of Rights, and the Equal Opportunities’ legislation), and its intertwining with ethnicity and race, I suggest that treatment of religious identities in post-British Hong Kong is rooted in an anachronistic historical and colonial holdover related to population classification. As we see in socio-legal practices related to burials, religious congregations, and freedom of religious practice, minorities’ experiences remain locked in “ethno-religious” categories now enshrined in the territory's legal frameworks. This paper thus offers a complementary perspective to understanding the marginal – or overlooked – position of religion in contemporary Hong Kong, via an analysis of its legal interconnection with racial identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Lok-yin Law on Muslims and Islam in Hong Kong, one by Jasjit Singh on Hong Kong Sikhs, and one by Wai Yip Ho on Indonesian Muslim foreign domestic workers.

The introduction of anti-racism legislation and post-colonial debate on Hong Kong identity has developed a stronger recognition of multiculturalism in Hong Kong. Muslims, who have had a continuous presence in the territory for over 170 years, are, however, still little understood. This paper looks at the ways in which local Cantonese media represents Muslims and how this representation continues to obscure Islam and present it as an oriental “other.” Representation of Muslims in the Media analysed is uneven with Chinese Muslims frequently being absent. In contrast, Islamic issues are often discussed by Muslims with a limited competence in Cantonese, or by non-Muslim professionals with a limited understanding of religious issues and vocabulary. Muslims and Islam, as a result, continue to be an overlooked part of the Hong Kong identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the transformative process of female vendors in the Silk Street Market, Beijing. They are female internal migrants hailing from a wide range of provinces including Anhui, Heilongjiang, Zhejiang and the city of Shanghai. The Silk Street Market has undergone a transformation beyond recognition from a makeshift open air market into an iconic place of modern Beijing located in the Central Business District. This global-meet-local marketplace not only provides female vendors with a living but also serves as an arena where they learn how to create upward mobility and thus contribute to the well-being of the family. Despite the obstacles of low educational attainment they manage to acquire everyday cosmopolitan skills enabling them to survive and flourish in the postmodern competitive urban jungle of Beijing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

China is marked by rising levels of consumption, but also high levels of social distrust. This paper offers an empirical study of luxury seafood consumption in banquets in Beijing as a way of understanding perceptions of and responses to a lack of trust in abstract social institutions in Chinese society. We focus on the chronic distrust Chinese people have in the food system and the economic system. Governance of the food system is marked by failures related to food safety and authenticity, while the formal institutions of the economic system are insufficient to provide security in professional contexts. Because people do not have social trust in the rationality and effectiveness of such abstract institutions, they are compelled to generate personal trust. Luxury seafood consumption in banquets is an important component of this process of generating personal trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Japan's Hokkaido region is popularly known as “Milkland,” underscoring the importance of the local dairy industry. Nevertheless, milk production costs in Japan are much higher than in surrounding nations and in order to bolster the domestic industry, for example justifying large subsidies, a constant “crisis state” has to be maintained by government and related agencies. In this paper I argue that the rhetoric of food security has a particular and lengthy history in Japan. It is generally communicated in terms of safety, risk, and self-sustainability, the need to protect Japan and Japanese from a series of ever-contingent threats both real and imagined. Concomitantly, there are essential misunderstandings between governmental agencies and dairy farmers rooted in the different identities and livelihoods that arise in “culturing” differing agricultures. As a result, official agencies claiming to protect the dairy industry in fact, through a mix of nationalist imagination and bio-scientific ignorance, work against it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the early 1990s, pushed by domestic economic recession and uncertainty of their life paths, young Japanese have been flying to Canada and Australia not only for holiday experiences, English learning, and temporary work, but also in the quest to find oneself. Searching for “international” work they really want to do, they often prolong their sojourning. Host countries often keep them in temporary resident status, postponing their career development. Suspended in foreigner status, the migrants themselves extend their “subjective youth” – what they see as an ongoing preparatory period in their lives. Based on fieldwork in Vancouver and Sydney, this paper elucidates how the emerging population of self-searching migrants blurs the conventional boundaries between youth and adulthood, and work and holiday, as well as sojourning and immigrating, thus extending “youth experience” indefinitely. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines anti-Chinese hate speech in Mongolia, and argues that in spite of its prevalence and pervasiveness it remains limited to a Mongolian audience, essentially constituting a vector of social policing. Its violence is thus largely exerted on Mongolian citizens themselves, particularly those “bad subjects” whose personal and intimate aspirations do not dovetail with the “good of the nation.” Through an ethnographic focus on Mongolian women, I illustrate how the experience of “bad subjects” intersects with nationalist narratives, both undercutting them and contributing to their perpetuation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I discuss anthropological approaches to natural disaster. Based on a comparative view between the Great East Japan Earthquake and The Great Hanshin Earthquake, I discuss the validity of fieldwork, which is the traditional method of research in anthropology, and explore the possibility of anthropological contributions to the study of natural disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I discuss anthropological approaches to natural disaster. Based on a review of the literature and my experience after the Great East Japan Earthquake, hereafter referred to as 3.11, I argue that responding (in the emergency period), bridging (in the early rehabilitation period), and writing (in the long-term reconstruction period) can be anthropological ways of dealing with natural disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Indian diaspora in an external sense--its geographic, demographic and historical features--and in an internal sense: how Indians abroad conceive and organize themselves in diaspora, especially in comparison to overseas Chinese. In my conclusion I discuss the broader implications of the Indian diaspora in the context of anthropology at large: What can studies of the Indian diaspora contribute to anthropology? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]